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Maybe we should blame Lucy. Evolution may have planted the genetic seeds of how we became high calorie junkies. Now politics is trying to redo what nature has wrought.

Three million years ago, Lucy—the partial skeleton of a young woman who has come to iconically represent our distant ancestor Australopithecus afarensis—roamed the fertile plains of North Africa. She survived mostly on fruits and seeds. With a brain roughly the size of a chimpanzee, Lucy was dimwitted and didn’t need a lot of calories to feed the high demands of advanced cogitation.

Flash forward to 2012. Our brains are more than three times as large. According to what’s known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, large brains are high-energy consumers. Brain size and diet are closely correlated. Consistent with an adaptation to a high-quality diet, modern humans also evolved relatively small gastrointestinal tracts. The smarter we became, the more calories we needed. Humans with a genetic knack for storing fat would have had a Darwinian advantage.

In other words, As Elizabeth Kolbert quipped in her 2009 New Yorker essay on the growing obesity problem, “just as it is natural of gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes.”

Modern humans consume all kinds of caloric-rich foods, and in great quantities. From a hard-wired perspective, the brain does not distinguish between Twinkies and a fat-laced steak. The human body, wrote, Michael Power and Jay Schulkin in The Evolution of Obesity, is “mismatched” to what’s available in today’s grocery stores. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa. We now live in Candyland.”

Yes, we have a fat problem. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 34% of adult Americans and almost 20% of pre-adolescents are overweight. But that’s hardly an American phenomenon. Studies show that the English, Greeks, Norwegians, Poles and other Western populations are almost as rotund, although their obesity levels are slightly lower. According to the World Health Organization, more than 1 billion people in the world are considered overweight, about 14 percent of the global population.

So, how should we address our compulsion to consume? We could educate ourselves to the need to harness our programmed desire to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, drink Coke and splurge on funnel cake. The catchphrase here is “energy balance,” which states, simply, that ‘energy in’ should equal ‘energy out’. Education could be tied to self-regulation, in which food manufacturers are asked to voluntarily reduce exposure to children of certain foods, with the commitments independently monitored. There are already signs that that strategy is working.

We could legislate. In New York City, for example, the New York City Board of Health has adoptedMayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to ban supersized sodas and sugary drinks, which has raised the hackles of left and right leaning libertarians everywhere. And school district’s across the country are rushing to ban ‘junk’ food and drinks on their premises.

We could tax. A growing number of European countries, including Denmark, Hungary, Finland and France have imposed taxes on what they consider unhealthy foods, from butter to cupcakes to soda. But not all foods high in fat or carbohydrates are unhealthy, which challenges the inclination to impose blanket taxes. Even indulgent foods eaten in moderation—think Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Dr. Pepper and late night nachos—are perfectly reasonable choices in a varied diet.

Food as drugs

Or, as is beginning to unfold in tort happy America, we could just sue. In the past few months alone, more than a dozen lawyers who previously had hit the class action lawsuit jackpot by suing tobacco companies have turned their sights on global food producers, restaurants and even grocery stores chains in hopes of yet another mega payday. They’ve filed more than 25 cases against international food companies, including ConAgra, PepsiCo, Heinz, General Mills and even yoghurt manufacturers.

To the ostriches in the food industry, beware: You are in the crosshairs of the NGO-Media-Class Action Bar Complex. What does that mean for your company and public health responsibilities?